Grafana is on a huge number of screens in a huge number of operations rooms, and most of the people staring at those dashboards learned the tool by copying someone else's JSON. GROT Academy, named after Grafana's robot mascot, is Grafana Labs trying to fix that, and for the most part it does a good job. The structure is a set of learning paths: Grafana fundamentals, dashboards, alerting, Prometheus, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, k6 for load testing, and Grafana Cloud administration. Each path breaks into short modules of roughly half an hour. That format is underrated.
Observability is usually learned in fragments by people who are busy, and a thirty-minute unit on alert rule evaluation is more likely to get finished than a ten-hour video course. Everything is free with an account, and completing a path gets you a Credly badge. The content quality is solid. The alerting material in particular is better than most of what you will find on Udemy, and the Loki path does a decent job of explaining why labels in Loki are not the same as labels in Prometheus, which trips up almost everyone the first time. We have two real complaints. The first is the drift toward Grafana Cloud.
A lot of teams run self-hosted Grafana with Prometheus, and while most of the concepts carry over, the newer modules assume Cloud-only features more often than they should. The second is the absence of any serious discussion of cardinality. High-cardinality labels are the single biggest cause of runaway observability costs, whether you pay Grafana Labs or pay your own cloud bill for Mimir. A vendor that bills on active series has an awkward incentive here, and the academy mostly steps around it.
Compare Honeycomb and Chronosphere, which both teach data reduction as a core skill. The paid certification is the murky part. Grafana offers one, but we could not find the price stated clearly on a public page, and third-party sites disagree by a hundred dollars. That is not a scandal, but it is the kind of thing a vendor should just publish. Our view: the free material is worth your time and the badges are a nice extra. Do the Prometheus path, then go and learn PromQL properly somewhere else.